Known as V1 or Vengeance Weapon 1, by Germany during World War II, the lineage of this flying-bomb technology can be traced to today’s cruise missiles and bomb-dropping drones. I plan to visually depict in this work how even a nascent technology such as the V1, was an effective terror weapon against a civilian population. The implications of today’s drone machines are more profound.  The Dark Ages continue.  

MAN TRAP was created from the idea to portray an industrial environment through a series of textured visual portraits. In this film, seemingly ordinary factory images are transformed into counter-intuitive symbols, disconnected from the human spirit. The photographic method intended to artistically capture a hidden visual aesthetic; with images derived from a seemingly an uninspired mechanized landscape. Integral to delivering the emotional impact of the film is a haunting psycho- active soundscape "You Send Me The Message" by ambient-electronic musician APRODUCE, from the album ALTARA.                                        

In CONTROLLED BLEEDING, the consequences of our dependency on a finite resource - oil, is brought to consciousness through perceptions of recent history.  In this work, artistic media images; juxtaposed symbolically and imbued with a sense of tragic irony, evoke epic human struggles:  David vs. Goliath, man vs. machine, and nature vs. technology. The control structure of oil, disastrously linked to our very survival, has resulted in our acceptance of managed chaos.  Played-out in the background for decades by political, corporate and military power brokers, the cost of needless human suffering, economic uncertainly and environmental ruin, is seen as incidental to protect the largest industry on earth.  CONTROLLED BLEEDING is a film of that nightmare; a nightmare from which we have not yet awakened. Note: The film is neither a historical account; nor a documentary.  It is an artistic work derived from various multi- media and assembled the same way the mind creates dreams - from fragments of seemingly random memories.  

This film is a symbol of the world we have created….. Using video taken by a cell-phone camera then secretly published to the Internet, this film depicts events beginning moments before the execution of former Iraq president and regional tyrant Saddam Hussein on December 30th 2006.  I saw this work as an opportunity to again juxtapose a situation Medieval in nature with the power of digital technology (cell phones & Internet) to reveal a history that in the past would never have been known. Video capture and encoding from cell phones at the time in the mid-2000’s was extremely grainy and at low-resolution, so therefore I had to use restorative tools to enhance the footage and create the proper ‘texture’ for the work. Employing this textured imagery, actual audio and additional sound design, the resulting horror surrounding this event is not from what you see, but what your mind imagines.

“The Dark Ages Film Series supports the premise that the Dark Ages never ended. The history of being human is one rooted in evolutionary biology and driven by technology.”